Estimates suggest that, on any given night, almost 800 individuals are unsheltered, and more than 3,700 are living in emergency or transitional housing in Philadelphia. Homelessness can often be connected to difficulties in finding affordable housing.
ULI Philadelphia has a long history of engaging the real estate community and the broader public on the need to preserve and increase the supply of affordable housing. Through alignment and receipt of grant funds from ULI’s Homeless to Housed (H2H) initiative, ULI members in Philadelphia identified two critical emergency and transitional housing providers—Families Forward Philadelphia, in West Philadelphia, and Drueding Center, near Olde Kensington. These two organizations sought advice about how best to leverage existing real estate assets to further support their twin missions. Due to the city of Philadelphia’s budgeting shifts in early 2024, critical city funding for transitional housing was sunsetted immediately, leaving both providers scrambling to reconfigure their housing delivery system. This funding shift added critical urgency to their work.
Families Forward and Drueding Center were eager to work with real estate and related industry professionals volunteering with ULI’s Technical Assistance Panel (TAP) program. A separate TAP was conducted for each organization, with the goal of identifying how its respective organization could reposition or expand its real estate assets to pivot away from the financially defunct transitional housing model and continue to provide critical supportive housing for individuals and families in need. In both TAPs, recommendations centered on the opportunities that would come with redeveloping existing real estate assets into more efficient and effective service solutions.
Drueding Center was so fortunate to be chosen to participate in ULI’s Homeless to Housed initiative in Philadelphia. We have been working for two years to try to figure out how to leverage our current assets to reimagine how we would continue our mission to serve the most vulnerable members of the city. We knew that changes would be coming, and we had to be prepared, but we were struggling to identify a clear path and get all stakeholders on the same page about what our future could look like. I’m still not sure how the [technical assistance panel] did it, but they learned about our history, mission, and hopes for the future and set out a clear vision for us, with some solid recommendations and ideas about how to achieve it. I am so grateful to ULI and our technical assistance panel members for their hard work and dedication to the process.
Drueding Center, founded by the Sisters of the Redeemer, has a long history of providing transitional housing services in its residential building. The group’s adjacent community center—outdated but very much in use—houses a daycare facility, after-school activities, and a food pantry for Drueding clients and surrounding residents. This panel, led by Stacey Mosley, director of research at Brandywine Realty Trust, delivered a range of actionable recommendations that would meet the organization’s needs, as well as the community’s. In addition to renovating the residential building to serve more families efficiently, the TAP recommendations included a completely new building at the community center site, this time intentionally designed to include housing units and the social services for which Drueding Center is well known.
By following the TAP recommendations, Drueding Center launched early-stage pre-development work on the community center project and hired a consultant to assist in the process. It is also following the panel’s recommendation to seek low-income housing tax credits to help fund its development work. Drueding’s staff leadership and board are taking time to evaluate how it will design and use the new building to meet critical housing needs while also providing social services to its families and, to a certain extent, the broader public. The TAP recommendations and the associated report have added an important layer of expertise and insight into Drueding’s communications with the community, its board, and the broader health system.
Families Forward, which operates the largest emergency shelter for families in Philadelphia, used the TAP to evaluate its emergency and supportive housing assets and to determine a strategy for more robust and efficient housing service delivery. With an emergency shelter that houses 65 families, 75 units of transitional and supportive housing, and a service delivery system, the real estate challenges before Families Forward are complex.
The panel for Families Forward, led by Paul Vernon, urban designer at Kimley-Horn, delivered recommendations that focused on important updates to Families Forward’s emergency shelter services and the retention of a building it owns. Families Forward operates an emergency shelter in space leased by the city from a private landlord. The landlord agreed to certain important renovations, including moving residents out of garden-level units to newly renovated units on upper floors. The landlord has also agreed to the panel’s recommendations to update the grounds, creating more welcoming and engaging outdoor spaces for families to enjoy.
In addition to its emergency shelter, Families Forward owns a standalone building that was used for transitional housing. As that model will no longer be operational, the panel strongly encouraged the organization to retain the building and renovate it to create a mix of apartments. The Families Forward board is set to explore this recommendation—a relatively complex development challenge for a nonprofit social service provider—more deeply at its upcoming strategic planning session.
Finally, Families Forward is following the panel’s recommendation to closely review the leases it holds with outside landlords to supply rapid rehousing units throughout the city. Through this review—looking closely at costs, quality of housing, landlord responsiveness, and other details—the organization should be able to determine which lease relationships are worth renewing and where it can cut ties in search of better living arrangements for its clients.
Both Drueding Center and Families Forward are standouts in their delivery of housing services. Leveraging the H2H program to their benefit and the benefit of their clients was an opportunity that ULI Philadelphia and each set of panelists found energizing and deeply rewarding. The cycle of homelessness cannot be broken without careful and safe interim housing opportunities. Through this initiative, Families Forward and Drueding Center each now has clear paths toward a future with more capacity to serve and greater opportunity for positive impact on the community as it helps families transition out of homelessness.
ULI member expertise helped service providers see how to fully leverage the value of their real estate portfolio to serve more individuals and families. These TAPs epitomize H2H’s theory of change—that connecting the technical know-how of members with the compassion and expertise of service providers can bring more deeply affordable units with supportive services to market.
Editor’s note: ULI Louisiana, alongside four other district councils (ULI Philadelphia, ULI San Antonio, ULI San Diego–Tijuana, and ULI San Francisco), received a Homeless to Housed (H2H) local technical assistance grant to explore real estate–driven solutions to homelessness. As a part of ULI’s Terwilliger Center for Housing, H2H works to catalyze the production and preservation of deeply affordable supportive housing to end the U.S. homelessness crisis. The work is made possible with the generous support of Carolyn and Preston Butcher and a growing number of ULI members.
